Greg Sheridan:
We have to face up to the fact that Christianity is in very significant statistical decline in the West. Now it’s not in the rest of the world. Uh, Latin America, Asia, Africa, Christianity is on fire. There are more Christians in China than there are members of the communist party. Uh, Christianity is, is, is a wildfire through Africa. So this is an eccentric cul-de-sac that the West has got to. By the West I mean Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and North America. But there is simply no denying the figures. 

John Dickson – Studio:

This is someone who knows the international scene. Greg Sheridan is one of Australia’s best known journalists, with something like forty years experience in the business. Greg cut his teeth at the legendary news magazine, The Bulletin, before moving on to the national daily newspaper, The Australian, where he’s been the foreign editor since 1982. He reckons Christianity isn’t looking too good in the West.

Greg Sheridan:
In Britain, now a minority of people, uh, believe in God of any kind. Um, and I think, uh, uh, quite a small minority, uh, uh, Christians. Uh, In Australia at the last census, it was 52% identified as Christians. That was a massive drop from the previous census. And the, uh, bias was overwhelmingly towards older people. So, uh, as they, uh, dying out, statistically, we’re becoming smaller. Now, I don’t think that’s a council of despair. Uh, you know, I’m an Irishman, so the situation is always desperate, never serious. You know, and there’s lots of, and I think it gives us great opportunities as a, as a creative minority. But I think you’ve got to look, you’ve got to look this, you know, the one person you should never lie to is yourself. So you’ve got to look the situation square in the face and you know, the influence, the adherence, the numbers are in decline in the West. 

John Dickson – Studio:

So why in these allegedly post Christian times would one of Australia’s most widely read journalists publicly out himself as a Christian? I’m John Dickson and this is Undeceptions…

Undeceptions theme

John Dickson – Studio:

The first time I connected with Greg Sheridan was over an article he was writing for The Australian – I can’t remember what it was about, something to do with Christianity, no doubt, and it sparked a series of emails and texts and phone calls. Another time we missed each other on the same flight from Melbourne to Sydney once – he called 3mins after I disembarked and said, “Were you on a Qantas flight just then – wanna have a coffee?” I was already in the taxi on the way home. Since then we’ve caught up a few times. This interview took place in Melbourne before COVID-19 brought air travel to a halt and, always the journalist, Greg couldn’t break the habit of admiring my new story-telling gear.

 

Greg Sheridan:
This technology is nifty. I’m so impressed. When I interviewed Turnbull for the book I had him on speaker phone and an old fashioned cassette recorder next to it. Worked perfectly. 

John Dickson – Studio:

But don’t be fooled by his gentle manner. Greg is an astute observer (and critic) of all things political and international He was on ABC Insiders… just the other week …

Media – Greg Sheridan on ABC

John Dickson – Studio:

His straight talking approach is why his observations about the alleged “slow death of Christianity in the West’ are so valuable.

John Dickson:
What’s your hunch? Let’s just take Australia. Why is it so on the wane?

Greg Sheridan:
Well, John, you’re right. There’s a huge, fabulous historical explanations of which Charles Tayler is a, is a primary example. And then there are what I call the proximate causes, the short term things…

John Dickson – Studio:

Charles Taylor is a major political philosopher from Canada. His 2007 book A Secular Age is regarded as one of the most important written on the subject of how the West lost its love affair with the spiritual – sort of !!!

Greg Sheridan:
There are three or four things that I’d identify in particular. One is, uh, that, um, we’ve had such sustained affluence for so long and affluence offers a particular temptation of the Christian because, uh, the Christian understands that everybody is in need of God’s mercy at every moment of their lives. As human beings, we always stand on the brink of annihilation. But if you enjoy good health and you have been very affluent for a very long time, you’re tempted to the view that you don’t need God’s mercy and therefore you don’t need God. Another factor I’d cite is the sexual revolution. It’s rather unbecoming for men of my age to be talking about these matters at all. But I do think this highly sexualized environment that we’ve created in the West is not really a natural environment, very difficult environment for people to cope with. You know, industrial level pornography is available to them at any moment on their smartphone and so on. Uh, I’m glad, really, uh, uh, I’m lucky, I think that that wasn’t the case when I was a kid. Uh, I don’t know. I don’t know what effect it would have had on me. I think that is a difficulty. 

John Dickson – Studio:

Hey, Greg isn’t just being a prude here! …  The pornographic industry is massive and dangerous. It earns more than 15-billion a year in the US alone, making it bigger than Netflix, Viacom and Hollywood as a whole. Just one of the major porn sites registered 35 billion visits in 2018. 93% of boys see porn before they’re 18; 62% of girls. An estimated 5-8% of the population are addicted to pornography. We delve into the awful underbelly of online porn last season in Episode 8 of Undeceptions, on Cybersex Trafficking. It’s a disturbing listen. Back to Greg …

Greg Sheridan:
Uh, the digital universe opens up spectacular possibilities, but it also has become, um, a sewer of abuse and a tremendous spreader of, uh, of corruption. And then the final factor that I’d add in the West is that for a whole host of complex historical reasons, a version of cultural self hatred has infected the West, especially its elite educational institutions, the universities and so on. And although Christianity is a universal religion, open to every human being and indeed the majority of Christians today are not Westerners, nonetheless, Western civilization is in a sense a uniquely formed by Christianity. So if you come to the view that Western civilization is at its root, a thing of evil, oppression, sexism, racism, uh, exploitation, all the rest of it, you tend to, um, damn Christianity by association. So I think all those trends are combined. And then there’ve been other specific things I wouldn’t deny the power of the child sexual abuse scandals, particularly in the Catholic church, but you know, throughout Christian denominations, like all those things together have been influential.

John Dickson – Studio:

Which prompts the question, what’s a nice journalist like Greg doing in a faith like this. Why choose now, of all times, to ‘come out’ as a Christian?

Greg Sheridan:
My challenge in my own life has never been belief. It’s always been living up to even the basics of belief. So I’ve just been a believing Christian all my life. Not to say I’ve never had challenges to belief, but generally the problem for me has not been belief. The problem has been behaving in a decent fashion. Um, and I’ve been a rackety journalist, you know, with everything that, that, uh, that embraces. But all through my journalistic career, I would occasionally write something from the sidelines, which implied my sympathy for belief. Uh, but I’ve been a professional journalist now for 40 years and in that time I’ve seen the culture go from being notionally sympathetic to Christianity, passing through a phase where I think it was neutral to now a phase where it’s hostile. So it’s important not to exaggerate this. Christians in Australia are not persecuted or anything, but the culture has become distinctly unsympathetic. A lot of things were being said, I think that were not true. Then a couple of other things were in my mind. One is journalism at its best, uh, is a search for the truth and a search for a good story. Well, Christianity is true and it’s the best story. So, okay, it might’ve taken me 40 years to realize this, but nonetheless, you know, even a blind pig finds an acorn, uh, occasionally. And, um, nonetheless, it was quite a thing to come out as it were as a Christian. So now I, I encourage other Christians to do the same. Uh, it’s all right to have my jokes about your own Christian background and occasionally to, you know, raise a little cheer from the sidelines saying good on your fellows. It’s another thing to come out and say, I believe that Jesus Christ is my savior. I believe in the bodily resurrection of, of, of Jesus and of all humanity that we’re all gonna face the four last things: um, you know, death, judgment, heaven and hell. Uh, I believe in one everlasting God who created the universe and so on. But I found that once you did it, it’s really not, it’s not so bad. I mean, people accept generally speaking that you, you’re saying what you believe. And, um, I, I’ve found that to be, uh, an enjoyable experience rather than the reverse and much less hostility than I would have, uh, thought, uh, perhaps also because it’s so novel. 

John Dickson – train:

Greg’s convictions about God and the Christian Faith are tied up with a small train platform on the line that runs just to north of Sydney. I’m on that very train now …. This is Artarmon, a reasonably well to do northern Sydney suburb full of neat houses, middle class families with 1.6 children, and (my producer tells me) three times the national average of computer system designers … none of which has anything to do with this story. This little suburb – this train station – was the unlikely setting for a quiet, and unexpected, revolution in Greg’s view of the world. It was here one day that Greg tried to convince himself to be an atheist, and failed.

Greg Sheridan:
The circumstances were I was a young man, it was a long time ago, I was, um, going out with a very fine young woman who was a conscientious atheist and, um, you know, you can see what a great uh, entertainer I was of my lady friends because we discussed the existence of God exhaustively, you know, I mean, we did want to do other more entertaining things too, but she was trying to convince me and I was trying to convince her and uh, I was very optimistic at that time in my life. I just thought I could do everything. You know, sometimes young men, you feel you can run through a brick wall. The world is your oyster. I mean, a week later you might be in the depths of despair and so on. But, but partly because faith is always about who you believe as much as what you believe, in my friendship with her, I was trying to explore whether her belief system could be true. And, um, I was on the train going from Chatswood to Wynyard and the train pulled up at Artarmon as it does sometimes inexplicably for 10 minutes – needed a rest – it was a very hot day. And I was thinking, well, if Atheism is true, then those people that I’m looking at down there, they’re no more significant than that bench that they’re sometimes sitting on. From Artarmon you could see down at the shopping centre and the people look like slightly enlarged ants. And I thought maybe that’s all they are. Uh, just ants, just energy and matter. Maybe they have no significance. Maybe when they’re, when they dead, they’re just gone. And that’s, uh, that’s the end of it. And I couldn’t argue myself into this proposition logically, but it also, it was just such an incredibly depressing, uh, uh, thing, you know. Um, it just seemed such a bleak and barren and, uh, uh, forlorn view of the human condition. And, um, after 10 minutes the trrain pulled out of Artarmon and I’d pretty well sort of said, I don’t think I can be an atheist, really. And by the time we got to Wynyard, I was, uh, you know, I fat and happy again and uh, and I’d pass through my. Now it may be an indication of very shallow intellect, but that was my really, that was as close as I ever got in my life to a formal adherence to a, to atheism.

John Dickson:
Maybe God has a thing for public transport. Of course, C.S. Lewis had his famous bus ride up the Headington Road in Oxford, and when he hopped on the bus, he was an atheist. And when he hopped off the bus, he was not, I’d forgotten that. So public transport.

John Dickson – Studio:

But for Greg, the train didn’t come to a rest there. After more than 40 years of reporting stuff, he decided it was time to put his own views down. Greg has written several books, mainly focusing on the power plays between Australian leaders and the political forces at work in Asia. But this one is a health check on Christianity in a post Christian West, Australia in particular. It’s called  – God is good for you.

John Dickson:
You make the case, uh, for God. Um, rationally you say it fits with all the sort of rational ways of looking at the universe and you, you draw on Thomas Aquinas and you know, these are still philosophically robust, uh, ways of talking about God. But I’m fascinated that you lay a big emphasis on personal experience because loads of people think that’s crap as evidence.

Greg Sheridan:
Yes. So I, I think John, myself, that personal experience is both critical as evidence and the predominant path that people take to Christianity, even people who described their conversion in intellectual terms I think really are moved by well and moved by the spirit. But they’re very often moved by an encounter with a Christian. They see God, they see Christ manifest in, in somebody that they know. Um, although of course God can find his way into the human heart in a million, in a million different ways. But, um, I was very influenced by a book by Roger Scruton who has just died, uh, called The Soul Of The World. He has a lovely chapter on belief in God and he’s actually not a very Orthodox Christian apologist. I don’t even really know if he was a believing Christian altogether. But in this lovely sort of a subtle sinuous chapter – I don’t know that I agree with everything he said the long human experience of God is the most powerful argument for God. And when you think of it, when we really have to prove something, we go to a court and what do we do in the court? We rely on human testimony. We rely on evidence. We understand that human beings are fallible, they can have imperfect recall. They can have poor judgment and so on. But he, he makes the case that the most powerful, rational argument for God in human history is the long human experience of God. Now people can try to dismiss this in a million different ways. They might say it’s an evolutionary, um, bias that makes survival better. But of course, it’s a very circular and difficult argument because what you’re saying then is that evolution predisposes us to believe in lies, but the proposition that God does not exist is the truth. And evolution has led us to this truth, even though it’s led us to a million other lies along the way. And indeed, if we are all just matter and nothing else, then our thought processes are just more or less random, uh, you know, consequences of matter and energy. So why should we privilege them in thinking that they can get to the truth. Now I think you end up in a horrible bog of relativism and, and you, you of, you go mad – it recalls, George Orwell’s remark that to believe certain things you have to be an intellectual cause no normal man could be so foolish, you know? And uh, for me the, the human disposition to believe in God across all eons is, is very persuasive. It’s not an absolute killer argument. I don’t think there is a killer argument for or against God, but it’s enormously persuasive.

John Dickson – Studio:

Greg’s book builds on this personal, practical experience of Christianity. It’s broken into two parts. Part 1 outlines the guts of Christianity and various arguments against it, as well highlights some of the contributions of the Christian Faith to the social good. Part 2 interviews a range of major political personalities – from the left and the right – about what they think personally about Christianity. 

Greg Sheridan:
In my view, one of the problems for mainline Christian leaders is that 50 years ago they were shepherding, especially in areas of social policy, a social consensus, and also in a sense a religious consensus. So they developed a style of leadership, which was, uh, maybe not perfect, but was suitable for that, for that environment. The environment now today is completely different, radically different. Uh, many of my Christian friends don’t like how much I use military metaphors, you know? But there’s a military term of art, situational awareness. You need to be able to integrate a lot of information into the battlespace in a, in real time. And the first thing Christian leaders need is to be situationally aware of the fact that they are now in a minority. But being in a minority actually frees you in a lot of ways. Now, this might appeal to me because I’m a, you know, temperamental Irishman, so I like being in the minority, you know, I like sort of using my gun powder to blow things up rather than having to preserve things. That’s again, that’s, that’s a clumsy metaphor, but for example, it prepares you better to be attacked, not physically attacked and not, not wickedly attacked, but for your positions to be mocked and derided. If you understand already that you’re in the minority, you’re not then quite so outraged. You’re still outraged as the people are defaming the truth, but you’re not quite so outraged – how dare they say such things – because that’s what you expect. You also develop different ways of speaking to the society. The society has, um, post-Christian elements, Christian elements and pre-Christian elements, elements which are so innocent of any knowledge of Christianity that they can be reasonably described as pre-Christian. So you have to have new ways of speaking to those. Now, I don’t make any comparisons of one denomination to another, favourable or unfavourable or anything, but I am impressed with the Pentecostals as a relatively young movement. They’ve kind of grown up with social media and contemporary music and so on. So they do contemporary stuff pretty well because that’s the environment that they’ve, they’ve formed their social being in. Now, I think, um, the mainline Christian churches and the individual Christian activists and so on are, are much better positioned if they accept that they’re saying something which is sort of radical and strange to the contemporary culture. Um, both at the level of, you know, transcendent belief and at the level of personal behavior. And also you need to be, um, tactically adept. You know, if there are falsehoods that get out quickly, you want to, you want to be able to respond to them quickly. You don’t really want to think it over and have a week’s retreat and spend a month thinking, thinking about it, consult with everybody. And then issue a statement which nobody reads. You know, um, contemporary social movements are very agile. They live on social media, they respond quickly. The need even to, to get a hearing, you’ve, you know, the, the culture doesn’t give you a good hearing. One reason I read this book was because the previous book wrote, I went to a whole lot of writers festivals. There was not a single Christian book anywhere. Now there are lots of great Christian books in Australia, you know, chief among them, your own, but, but none of them was at any of these writers festivals. And I thought this is the secular society actually keeping Christian voices away. So Christians then can complain about that, but actually they need to develop strategies to overcome that situation.

John Dickson – Studio:

As an expert in domestic and international politics, Greg has a thought or two about how the Church can cut through in a post Christian society. That … after the break.

John Dickson – Studio:

Christians have often found themselves, compelled by Christ, grasping for the reigns of power. Christian politicians and protestors have made huge gains as they’ve brought Christ to bear on the political process. As an independent British MP, William Wilberforce led the 18th century movement to abolish slavery. Martin Luther King Junior was an American preacher who led the US civil rights movement from 1955 till his assassination in 1968. And there are many more positive stories to tell. But there have also been occasions when the Gospel has become so inextricably entwined with the political party. I’m thinking of the role of the Catholic church in Latin American regimes … or the controversial connection between conservative Evangelicalism and a conservative White House from the Reagan era to today. With my ancient history hat on, I mostly think of how Christians in the fourth and fifth centuries rushed to the seat of power when Emperor Constantine and others invited them in. Only this morning – literally this morning – I was reading a fourth century text rejoicing at the way Constantine took the symbol of the cross and placed it on the Roman standards to fight under the banner of Jesus Christ:

“The emperor constantly made use of this sign of salvation as a safeguard against every adverse and hostile power, and commanded that others similar to it should be carried at the head of the armies.”  

Yikes!! Anyway, Greg has strong political views, and a deep conviction that Christians should own their faith in every part of life – including on the floor of senates and parliament. I was interested to know if he thought there was such a thing as God’s party.

John Dickson:
Many would describe you. Those of you know, tracked your journalistic career as on the right. Um, you would probably quickly say center-right, you’ll accept that. Um, and I’m interested in the way you, you, you, um, I slept put, there’s a, certainly in your book you want to say that Christianity isn’t right or left, that, you know, Christianity can be just as robust on the right and on the left. Can you talk about that a bit more? Because one of the things I worry about as I look on the world scene is Christianity only or aligning itself with the right. And you know, perhaps the far right and that that is doing damage to the Christian faith. So you as a right winger conservative, you still actually think Christianity can be perfectly at home on the left.

Greg Sheridan:
Oh, absolutely. I think that’s a very important point. Quite complex and difficult to deal with in a way because there are so many things that intersect. One of the politicians I interview in my book is, is a, is Penny Wong. There are loads of labor politicians in my book. But Penny is a member of the socialist left of the labor party. And, um, I’m grateful to her for being interviewed by me.

John Dickson – Studio:

For my international friends, Labor in Australia is roughly the same as the Labour Party in the UK (except here for some reason we drop the ‘u’ in the word labour, even though the noun labour here has the “u”). Oh, and the Labor party is roughly the equivalent of the Democratic party in the United States. The point is, Greg has talked to a wide range of politicians who identify as Christians – or at least say they revere the Christian Faith.

Greg Sheridan:
I’m not making any judgements about their politics. Um, but I certainly don’t, um, in any way doubt the sincerity of their Christianity because in some elements their politics, we may disagree.The last political party I was a member of was the Labor Party. And I’ve got many, many, many close, very close friends, uh, in the Labor Party. I probably have grown a little more conservative as I’ve grown older. I certainly don’t think Christianity adjudicates between well intentioned, uh, policies on the center-left or the center-right. So giving an example without labouring the thing too much. You might say it’s a Christian desire that underprivileged people be better treated. Now one way of doing that is for the government to provide a welfare program. That’s perfectly legitimate, good, honest policy. A response. Another way of doing it might be to deregulate elements of the labor market so that more people at the bottom of the labor market get jobs. This is very powerful. argument in India for example, where just having a job, being in the formal economy makes you a thousand times better off than being in the informal economy. But it’s hard to get into the formal economy because it’s so regulated. So if a Christian policymaker says, I’m going to help poor people with greater welfare, I think that’s perfectly legitimate. If a Christian policymaker says I’m going to help people by deregulating elements of the labor market, I think that’s perfectly acceptable. And I think it’s wrong of Christians to imply a religious authority to arguments of that kind. There are some issues obviously, where there’s a religious authority. If you’re dealing with Nazis or you know, genuine racists or whatever, that’s not only bad policy, that is absolutely wrong. It’s against the law of God and the law of men. And it’s wrong and it’s right to be denounced in that way. But very little that we have in Australia, uh, you know, qualifies for that sort of extreme. Now I think it’s a pity that too much of the left have abandoned the, uh, traditions of Christian social democracy. The British labor party was, what was it called? The Methodist, Methodist church at prayer, you know, and um, the great, uh, Papal encyclical Rarem Nova Novarem by Leo the, the whatever, um, insistent on the rights of trade unions and the rights of workers and so forth. Clement Attlee, uh, who introduced the welfare state to Britain talked about the Christian inspiration of socialism. Now I think it’s a pity that the left is sort of itself turned against Christianity, but I certainly argue myself and I certainly believe that we Christians have no business pretending that legitimate policy. So it’s fair enough for us to say, I, I’ve come to this policy conclusion influenced by my values, which are Christian values. That’s okay. Although I didn’t, I never really say that, I just try to argue a policy case on its merits, but it’s wrong of us, whether we’re on the left or the right to say, if you don’t agree with my policy on paid parental leave or on state aid for Christian schools or whatever it might be, you’re a bad Christian and I think we should be in that business. And Christianity is not narrow and sectarian like that.

John Dickson – Studio:

I’m glad Greg is clear that he reckons Christians can validly belong to any major party – I suppose some of my listeners will be surprised to hear that. And others may flat out disagree with him (from both sides of the equation). But Greg’s most controversial political claims comes next.

John Dickson:
You ah go right out on a limb in suggesting that Christianity actually gave the West feminism, liberalism, science. Uh, really?

Greg Sheridan:
Absolutely. So this is one of the great, uh, one of the great reasons of writing a book is that you learn something, uh, in the process. And, um, I was very influenced by wonderful Oxford historian Larry Siedentop who wrote, uh, I think the, the finest book of history I’ve ever read called, Inventing The Individual. And, uh, I had the great pleasure of having lunch with Larry Siedentop in London recently. And, uh, as I understand it, he’s not a believing Christian, but he is a fantastic scholar. Uh, Really one of the most august historians in the world and in his book, Inventing the Individual, he argues that by the late middle ages, everything that we recognize as modern liberalism had been thoroughly thought through in the long dialectic of Christianity. So going back to the ancient world, the most radical pro human rights statement is that God created humanity in the image of God. That was not a common view in the ancient world before the book of Genesis. The first statement, um, in a sense in favor of secular government is render unto God that which is God’s and render unto Caesar that which has Caesar’s. Another historian, Rodney Stark, a sociologist of religious history, argues that one of the great drivers of early Christian expansion was that Christianity created a sexual revolution, which was the best circumstance for women and girls, which had ever been known in the history of humanity until then. Christian morality meant that slaves could not abuse the other masters could not abuse their slave sexually. It invented marriage as an institution of reciprocal love. It insisted on choice in marriage so that the overwhelming authority of the male head of the family was in a sense trumped or beaten by the authority of Christian teaching. Uh, it, um, conceived of humanity as individuals enjoying a divine relationship with their maker, and therefore it was the individual who became key, not the family or the clan. And of course from its earliest times it was Universalist. You know, the famous statement from St. Paul, there is neither Greek nor Jews, slave nor free, male nor female. You’re all one in Christ Jesus. 

FIVE MINUTE JESUS

Let’s press pause… I’ve got a five minute Jesus for you…

I mentioned earlier that this morning I happened to be reading a fourth century Christian text (for a book I’m writing on the history of the church) . It was from the scholar-bishop Eusebius, and he was writing shortly after the emperor, Constantine, announced he had become a Christian. According to Constantine’s own testimony, just before a huge battle with his rival Maxentius, he saw a vision in the sky of a huge cross. Inscribed on the cross were the words In hoc signo vinces / In this sign, conquer. Constantine fought and won (at the battle of Milvian Bridge on Oct 28 AD 312), and henceforth fashioned his standards—the banners the armies fight under—with a huge cross. This is what Eusebius was approving. The astonishing thing is: for the last 8 years before that, Christians had been severely persecuted by Roman authorities: churches were destroyed, Scriptures burned, all Christians in high places were deposed, and many were tortured and killed. Eusebius had lived through it all. And now he was happy to have the cross on the Roman standards. He writes:

“The emperor constantly made use of this sign of salvation as a safeguard against every adverse and hostile power, and commanded that others similar to it should be carried at the head of the armies”

A people used to mockery and social exclusion (and worse), were now invited into the very centre of power. And, perhaps most bizarrely, the Christian sign of humble self-sacrifice—a cross—was now a formal part, the very symbol, of the Roman war machine. It is just so hard to get my head around, when I consider what Jesus had said about his cross and its social implications. James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came to Jesus. “Teacher,” they said, “we want you to do for us whatever we ask.” “What do you want me to do for you?” he asked. They replied, “Let one of us sit at your right and the other at your left in your glory.” They’re thinking of a conquering messiah, who will lift Israel above Rome, and crush the enemies of God. “You don’t know what you are asking,” Jesus said. When the ten heard about this, they became indignant with James and John.  This is almost comedic: the apostles are indignant. NOT disappointed at James/John’s lack of humility! All want glory! They’re thinking religion = domination. This prompts one of most precious theological and ethical statements of the Gospels:

Jesus called them together and said, “You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

There’s theology and ethics right along side each other here. Theology is Jesus’ mission. He came not to conquer but to serve and die. And there’s social ethics right alongside this: There’s hardly a more obvious reality in the Roman world: Caesars subjugated those under them. “You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant,a 44 and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all.” The ‘great’ in God’s eyes (the ‘first’) are those who serve and suffer in the way of the cross. James and John wanted ‘first’ position in Kingdom. Jesus says those spots go to people shaped by cross. Christians did live that way through the first 300 years of the church. Their brave resolve to serve and suffer is remarkable, and everywhere in our ancient sources—both Christian sources and Roman ones. But those lines in Eusebius—praising the cross on a Roman military standard—are a complete reversal of Christ’s teaching. I find it so depressing. Then again, there’s much in the same period I find inspiring. One of Eusebius’ contemporaries was a philosopher and teacher in the academy at Nicomedia (near Constantinople). His name was Lactatnius. He was a Christian. He was sacked from his job in the Great Persecution in 303. He survived, and wrote an amazing treatise for his pagan intellectual buddies called the Divine Institutes, in which he writes:

“There is no need for violence and brutality: worship cannot be forced; it is something to be achieved by talk rather than blows. Religion must be defended not by killing but by dying, not by violence but by endurance, not by sin, but by faith.”

So, it’s mixed. Christian history is mixed. There are some who have thought power (and even violence) was the way to promote the truth. But there are others, who followed Jesus when he said, “whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant”. You can press play now.

Greg Sheridan:
This is very self indulgent, but one thing I loved in Larry Siedentop, which I read a number of other historians, was his treatment of medieval Christianity. Um, it’s not the black record of darkness that people pretend. So very early on, uh, in the sixth century, you get Benedict creating the monastic movements. The monasteries, the Benedictine monasteries were the first democratic, egalitarian, self-governing, industrious communities created in the history of humanity. They elected their own Abbot. The monks elected their own Abbot. Whether you had been a Prince or a nobleman or a slave, you wore the same monastic habit, when you went into the monastery. Um, everyone was treated equally. There’s a special, the, the rule of Saint Benedict is on sale and in bookshops today you can see there’s a special injunction. You must welcome the poor as if you are welcoming Christ himself. And then the monks, although living, you know, obviously Holy lives worked six or eight hours a day in the field. So hierarchical societies typically have slaves or serfs doing the physical work. Here were the monks, the elect of God working six or eight hours hard in the field. So the local people loved them. Also, they were very rational, so they improved farming techniques. The very discovery of experimental science, according to many historians, came from the Christian view of nature as both natural, therefore not inhabited by warring spirits, and also as reflecting the order of God’s mind. So experimental science was an attempt to discover the order of God’s mind manifest in nature. Christianity because of revelation and, uh, the resurrection and so on meant that history had to be viewed as linear rather than as an endless cycle of repetition and a cyclical view of history, uh, assists fatalism and apathy. Whereas a linear view of history means you can actually make things better. Now, I’ve done very poor service to that argument, but, and Siedentop’s book, uh, makes this argument in a magisterial fashion. Even things, the systems of Papal governance, uh, inspired States to improve their own level of governance. The subjection to the universal Christian authority meant that you were no longer fully subject to the local feudal Lord who was, uh, overseeing you. Now, there are a million other developments as well, but the, everything we like in liberalism, universalism, the distinctiveness and the universality of the human condition , the dignity of women, the dignity of all people, slaves, foreigners, et cetera. comes not from rejecting Christianity, but from fidelity to Christianity.

John Dickson – Studio:

But where can someone hope to find this authentic Christianity in an age of political opportunism, hyper-individualism, as well as mulit-denominationalism? Greg says the answer is quite simple.

Greg Sheridan:
Well, one of the, um, legitimate criticisms of the book is that I didn’t do enough to present the personality of Jesus in the gospels. And I do assert in the book that the personality of Jesus is central to Christianity. But so much of the attack on Christianity has been that our beliefs are somehow rather ridiculous so I thought it’s a real service to people just to say what do we actually believe? And I thought the Apostle’s creed was a fairly universal statement of Christian belief. So there are, there are Anglicans and Catholics and Pentecostals and evangelicals and Baptists and Uniting Church and Coptic church and uh, and, and other varieties of Christian in the book. And I think they can all subscribe to the Apostle’s creed. 

John Dickson – Studio:

The Apostles’ Creed is a simple summary of the Christian faith in 83 words (well, 83 in the ancient Greek – I don’t know about the English). Although it’s not said out loud in all churches, it’s content is accepted by pretty much all brands of the Faith – Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Anglican, Uniting … even Hillsong wrote a song based on it … The creed itself goes like this:

I believe in God, the Father Almighty
maker of heaven and earth
and in Jesus Christ  his only Son our Lord
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit
 born of the virgin Mary
suffered under Pontius Pilate
was crucified, dead, and buried. He descended to the dead . The third day he rose again from the dead. He ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of 
God the Father almighty. From there he shall come
 to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit
the holy catholic church
the communion of saints
the forgiveness of sins
the resurrection of the body
and the life everlasting. 

Greg Sheridan:
And the Apostle’s creed is a wonderfully, um, clear declaration of what we believe. I believe in God, father almighty, creator of heaven and earth. Uh, and, and it’s very clear on the things which, um, the culture really hates now. You know, uh, on the third day he rose from the dead and, and will come, uh, in judgment and so forth. And I thought, you know, you can’t actually hold the view that Jesus was just a kumbaya social worker or Mahatma Ghandi, nice guy, and had no normative or transcendent or religious claims to make, um, if you actually read what he said in the gospel, but the, the Apostle’s creed is a, is a wonderful summation of Christian belief. I think it is good for us as Christians to be very clear about how radical our beliefs are. You know, in reading about Christianity, uh, I saw some description of it as, um, so you eat this dead guy’s flesh and drink his blood and then some super being in the, in the heavens, reads your mind and if you commit thought crimes, he sends you to eternal fire and damnation. Now that is, that is a ridiculous caricature of Christian belief. But I thought how radical Christian belief really is to the secular culture. The Trinity, the mystery of the Trinity, the Trinitarian God, father, son and Holy spirit. Christians have more or less always believed this from very early times. It’s very clear in the gospels, the Apostle’s creed makes it very clear. So in a way it was a good amateur’s device to say, look, you know, I haven’t spent 50 years in professional study of theology as you have John, but, but here it is. You don’t actually have to be a PhD to know what the Christian belief is. It’s all, it’s all there for you in the Apostle’s creed. 

Undeceptions theme